The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America - autonomous ...

8o Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America
alternative. The initiation of coffee planting by peasants in the
19203 was a response to this.
The merchants who flocked to Puerto Tejada in the 19205 and
19305 to buy peasant cash crops also acquired great political control.
They were whites, generally from Antioquia, and members of the
Conservative party. The black-owned shops around the central
plaza were replaced by theirs. These middlemen held agencies or
commissions from the large cocoa- and coffee-buying firms. Conveniently
entangled with these large firms, they were just as conveniently
disentangled from the peasant producers, whom they
could exploit with little fear. Although outsiders could act as businessmen,
there were reasons why this was not so easy for locals. As
an old peasant points out:
The black is more afraid of big business deals. He fears to put
even 20 cents into a business because he thinks he will lose it.
The black is less of a financier than the white. He's just not
the same as a "Paisa" [Antioquefio]. The "Paisa," if he has 20
cents, he invests them, and gets out 40 or nothing. The blacks
here are agricultural people. They aren't acquainted with business,
with the bringing in of a pack of clothing or establishing
a cocoa-buying agency. And what is more, if I set up a shop
here, then it's not long before the gossip and the maliciousness
starts; the envy of man against man. And then I slowly enter
ruin because I have to live by trust. "Here, take it, pay me tomorrow!
Go on, take it, tomorrow will be alright!"
And then you, for reasons of race, or because you are a cornpadre,
or for friendship, just never pay me. In that way I would
become ruined. I would lose all my capital. But the white man,
no!,- because he gives me credit within the bounds of business—he
gives me credit of 40 cents because he has already
robbed me of 80 on the same deal. He already has 80 cents
profit. Thus he gives me 40. If they are lost, he really hasn't
lost anything!
By the late 19303, land pressure seems to have become acute. The
sugar industry and large-scale commercialized agriculture were becoming
firmly institutionalized in the social fabric through more
stable financing and powerful landlords' associations, welded together
by a common fear of the peasantry and the need to control
marketing and infrastructural development (cf., Gilhodes, 1970:
417,- Fals Borda, 1969:141; Dix, 1967:323-26). Technological uplift
with improved varieties of sugarcane and other crops, together with
new livestock species and methods of breeding, was introduced or